Since its foundation in 2010, the Afghanistan National Institute of Music in Kabul has been working small miracles. Its students – among them orphans, street vendors and other disadvantaged children – play both western and traditional Afghan instruments in groups which include a ground-breaking girls’ ensemble. On this album, the fruit of a remarkable collaborative project, they meet the US string sextet Cuatro Puntos. In Sadie Harrison’s Gulistan-e Nur: The Rosegarden of Light, they perform Afghan songs and dances which Harrison’s music then explores and develops. Kevin Bishop’s arrangements of Afghan tunes likewise link east and west in a visionary venture celebrating the power of music to transform lives as it also revives and rebuilds Afghan musical traditions.